Israeli generative AI company AI21 Labs has announced the closing of $155 million Series C financing round at a company valuation of $1.4 billion. Investors include Walden Catalyst, Pitango, SCB10X, b2venture, Samsung Next and Prof. Amnon Shashua with participation from Google and Nvidia. The new funding brings the total amount raised by AI21 Labs to $283 million.
The Tel Aviv-based AI and large language models (LLMs) developer will use the new funds to accelerate the growth of its highly accurate text-based generative AI services for enterprises.
Founded in 2017 by chairman Prof. Amnon Shasuha, and co-CEOs Prof. Yoav Shoham, and Ori Goshen, AI21 Labs has been one of the pioneers of generative AI to the masses. In meeting growing demand, the company has built a strong customer base serving consumers to Fortune 100 companies with the power of its advanced LLM and natural language (NLP) technologies through easy-to-use applications and APIs.
AI21 has built AI systems that are easy to integrate and that generate reliable, trustworthy, and accurate results with more refined control than any standalone existing model. The company's proprietary Jurassic-2 foundation models are some of the world’s largest and most sophisticated LLMs. Jurassic-2 powers AI21 Studio, a developer platform for building custom text-based business applications off of AI21’s language models; and Wordtune, a multilingual reading and writing AI assistant for professionals and consumers.
Shashua said, "AI21 Labs is a pure play in AI as it develops and owns foundation models which are served as a platform to developers and enterprises, while developing derivatives, such as Wordtune, directly to end users. The current round fuels the growth of the company to reach its goal of developing the next-level of AI with the capabilities of reasoning across many domains. We believe that the impact of AI21 Labs growth plans would be of a global scale and quite soon."
Prof. Yoav Shoham and Ori Goshen added, "AI21 Labs’ cutting edge technology, including leading large language models and neurosymbolic technology, provides the robustness, predictability and explainability required in the era of AI-first enterprises. We look forward to continuing this journey with our investors, partners and customers".
"Generative AI is driving a new era of computing across every industry," said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA. "The innovative work by the AI21 Labs team will help enterprises accelerate productivity and efficiency with generative AI-based systems that are accurate, trustworthy, and reliable."
The new funding follows AI21’s progress in bringing generative AI to enterprises and professionals. This includes collaborations with market-leading customers in diverse sectors, among them Carrefour, Clarivate, eBay, Guesty, Monday.com and Ubisoft.
Goldman Sachs served as sole financial advisor to AI21 in this round.
Published by Globes, Israel business news - en.globes.co.il - on August 31, 2023.
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